It happened today - December 5, 2015

Seventy years ago today, on Dec. 5 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers vanished in the “Bermuda Triangle”. Oooooooooo!

I remember the Bermuda Triangle or “Devil’s Triangle” being big in the 1970s. Since it was also the decade of “what’s your sign”, Chariots of the Gods (technically first published in German in the late 1960s), pyramid power and other superstitious nonsense driven by gullibility remarkable even by human standards, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.

We should however be skeptical. Yes, boats and even planes disappear there sometimes. It’s because the ocean is big and dangerous and things can go wrong and the “Bermuda Triangle”, stretching from Florida northeast to Bermuda, south to Puerto Rico and back to Florida, is a rather busy part of the ocean so a lot of things travel through it. Some don’t make it. But on a percentage basis there’s nothing weird about it.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, for instance, identified the 10 most dangerous waters for shipping in 2010 and this place didn’t make the list. And many of the most colourful tales are inventions or distortions of a rather childish sort.

Bermuda itself is quite a hazard to shipping. Popping up unexpectedly all by itself out in the Atlantic and surrounded by a maze of reefs, it was such a menace in the old days that its crest shows a shipwreck. Not because of aliens, monsters or a space-time vortex. Just a rock you didn’t see coming.

That humans are determined to believe in rubbish like the Bermuda Triangle is a comment on us not it.